Providing resources to help people that support students with learning differences to transition after high school (Postsecondary Planning for Students with Learning Differences by @NichelleMcCall on @scoopit http://t.co/1uyLUdsC...)...

“When I decided to take karate, I visited every school in the area,” he said. “No one greeted me, even spoke to me. They just want to take your money and sign you up. Then I came to Louie’s studio; he stopped and recognized me as soon I walked in the door. He spent about 40 minutes talking to me. I’ve been here ever since. With Louie, it’s really about the students; it’s never about the money. This place is a hidden gem.”One of Louie’s T’ai Chi students said, “He doesn’t do it for the accolades or the money, he teaches for the love of the art and his love for people.” Unlike most self-defense programs, he doesn’t charge more for higher belt levels and the rates are very reasonable. His students admit to feeling like they have to offer more money because his programs are worth so much since they get so much out of it.All of the teachers in the studio are adult black-belts who share his commitment to teaching and helping students and adults learn this ancient technique safely and accurately. From parents watching their children learn karate, many have since enrolled in self-defense or T’ai Chi classes.

Lou Salza's insight:

Our Cousin Louie has been studying the martial Arts since he was a boy. From 1975-1979 Louie taught karate to residential students at the Landmark School In Pride's Crossing. With the right instructor and at the right school, the study of Kata, and Tai'Chi can help our kids develop physical and mental stamina, and build confidence.

It’s one thing to read about how a learning or attention issue can affect your child. It’s another thing to see it through your child’s eyes. Experience firsthand how frustrating it can be when your hand won’t write what your brain is telling it to write. Find out why it can be so hard to complete a simple task even when you’re trying to pay attention. Use these one-of-a-kind simulations and videos to get a better sense of what it feels like to have learning and attention issues.

Lou Salza's insight:

I applaud Understood.org for this sequence of videos and simulations. They well worth our time. The student explanations are of course spot on. While the simulations are --well--simulations, they convey the feeling if not the substance of the challenges and struggles.--Lou

Paul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute sooner, Paul Offit says, it would surely have appeared as though the vaccine had caused the seizure and probably no study in the world would have convinced the parent otherwise. (The Offits have such studies at the ready — Paul is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and author of “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.”) Indeed, famous anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy has said her son’s autism and seizures are linked to “so many shots” because vaccinations preceded his symptoms.

But, as Offit’s story suggests, the fact that a child became sick after a vaccine is not strong evidence that the immunization was to blame. Psychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the “illusion of causality.” A study recently published in the British Journal of Psychology investigates how this illusion influences the way we process new information. Its finding: Causal illusions don’t just cement erroneous ideas in the mind; they can also prevent new information from correcting them.

Lou Salza's insight:

Thank You to our good friend and colleague Steven Dykstra from spelltalk@listserve.com for this provocative article. The subject of this study is how quickly "Illusions of causality" form in medicine especially around the vaccination debate going on in the US right now. These illusions establish a strong grip on our minds that will not yield to sound data, evidence or information that exposes the fallacy. I read this because Steven Dykstra used it as an example of why it is so hard to get evidence based reading education practices firmly established in our schools. I have written before about my own work in schools with teachers --that there is integrity in resistance to change. This article provides data about where that integrity resides. --Lou

The last paragraph is a call to action:

Excerpt:

"...the lesson of controversial political, health and science issues is that people don’t apply their critical-thinking skills in the same way when they have a preference for who’s right.” Studies by law professor Dan Kahan at Yale show that even highly numerate people are prone to cognitive trapswhen the data contradicts the conclusion most congenial to their political values.

So where does this leave us? With a lot of evidence that erroneous beliefs aren’t easily overturned, and when they’re tinged with emotion, forget about it. Explaining the science and helping people understand it are only the first steps. If you want someone to accept information that contradicts what they already know, you have to find a story they can buy into. That requires bridging the narrative they’ve already constructed to a new one that is both true and allows them to remain the kind of person they believe themselves to be."

The Laurel School’s experienced faculty and staff have been instructing students with dyslexia in Mercer County and nearby areas of New Jersey and Pennsylvania for over 35 years, and are now offering an entire school program designed specifically for the dyslexic mind. “Our objective at the Laurel School is to offer the most advanced learning techniques to children in a way that maximizes the potential of each student,” says Executive Director Dr. Gordon Sherman. “We use evidence-based instruction for our students and expert professional development for educators, empowering students to grow into innovative members of society. We call this Celebrating Cerebrodiversity, because we believe students with dyslexia can contribute extraordinary gifts to our world when they are provided with a properly enriched learning environment.”

Lou Salza's insight:

Excerpt:

"Dr. Sherman was Director of the Dyslexia Research Lab at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and faculty member in Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School before becoming the Executive Director at The Newgrange School in Hamilton, NJ in 2002 and the Laurel School in 2012. Dr. Sherman’s Ph.D. is in Developmental Psychobiology; his research focused on development of the brain and the understanding of developmental dyslexia. He is the author and editor of over 80 scientific articles, reviews, and books, and he was the President of the International Dyslexia Association (and since 2010 is back on the IDA board). “We are thrilled to be offering this comprehensive educational experience for students with dyslexia right here in Princeton, New Jersey,” he adds.

Linguistics is a science, and orthography should be taught that way. Our students should be taught to seek evidence for particular spellings and pronunciations. Let's investigate the word two. The first thing a student should do is come up with a scientific hypothesis about why this word contains the letter w and then go in search of the evidence. Sooner or later, they come up with this evidence: the w is there to mark the relationship of the word two with twice, twin, between, twenty, twilight, and so many more. Here is a graphic of the investigative process:

Lou Salza's insight:

our system of writing and spelling in English preserves the meanings of words despite changes and migrations of our pronunciation. Encouraging our dyslexic student to become "linguistic Detectives does two things: 1. it engages students' intellect and curiosity; 2. reveals patterns in so called 'sight' words.--Lou

Our story starts in Virginia where Tommy was born but quickly moves to Georgia and South Carolina where he was raised with his two older sisters and younger brother. His father was a Presbyterian minister who also occasionally taught at university, and his loving mother was herself the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Tommy’s father was demanding, and scholarship and piety defined his household. Unfortunately for Tommy, he was a poor student who did not learn the alphabet until age 9 and wasn’t able to read until almost age 12. These struggles led his teachers to think of him as slow and his parents to describe him as a “dolt” and “lost cause.” Tommy enjoyed learning though and from a young age, aspired to greatness. His parents offered him academic support and his father, being the prominent pastor that he was, would instruct Tommy for hours, each night, in the art of oratory and debate. Who is Tommy? When Tommy finished college, he stopped going by his first name and started using his middle name. We know Tommy better as the United States’ 28th president – Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Though undiagnosed, it is very likely that Woodrow Wilson had some learning difference. Many historians believe he had dyslexia, and that’s the part of the story that makes me think of Assets School.

Lou Salza's insight:

Ryan Masa, K-8 Principal of the Assets School in Honolulu, weaves together a cautionary tale for all educators: First he takes the dangerous conclusions parents and teachers often draw regarding children who struggle to learn to read in school. Next he weaves gives us a lesson in US History relevant to the State of the Union address this week. Finally he brings us to Assets School where 2e students have been well cared for and brilliantly educated for 3 decades. This is a must read!--Lou

The process that precedes decision making is problem solving, when information is gathered, analyzed, and considered. This is deceptively difficult to get right, yet it is a key input into decision making for major issues (such as M&A) as well as daily ones (such as how to handle a team dispute).

2. Operating with a strong results orientation.

Leadership is about not only developing and communicating a vision and setting objectives but also following through to achieve results. Leaders with a strong results orientation tend to emphasize the importance of efficiency and productivity and to prioritize the highest-value work.

3. Seeking different perspectives.

This trait is conspicuous in managers who monitor trends affecting organizations, grasp changes in the environment, encourage employees to contribute ideas that could improve performance, accurately differentiate between important and unimportant issues, and give the appropriate weight to stakeholder concerns. Leaders who do well on this dimension typically base their decisions on sound analysis and avoid the many biases to which decisions are prone.

4. Supporting others. Leaders who are supportive understand and sense how other people feel. By showing authenticity and a sincere interest in those around them, they build trust and inspire and help colleagues to overcome challenges. They intervene in group work to promote organizational efficiency, allaying unwarranted fears about external threats and preventing the energy of employees from dissipating into internal conflict.

We’re not saying that the centuries-old debate about what distinguishes great leaders is over or that context is unimportant. Experience shows that different business situations often require different styles of leadership. We do believe, however, that our research points to a kind of core leadership behavior that will be relevant to most companies today, notably on the front line. For organizations investing in the development of their future leaders, prioritizing these four areas is a good place to start...."

The future of learning in society is virtually unlimited, at least for the foreseeable future. Learning is the conversion of information into knowledge; information, in the digital age has become a vast sea of ones and zeros; information becomes knowledge by passing through some medium that transforms the ones and zeros into a conceptually organized form. In the past, we have thought of this transformation as a single authoritative portal, called schooling. The advent of digital culture means that this portal is now one among many possible places, virtual and physical, where information can become knowledge. The type of knowledge and skill required to negotiate this increasingly complex world is completely different from what schools have conventionally done, and schools are institutionally disadvantaged as players in this new world, in large part because of the well-intentioned efforts of school reformers.

Lou Salza's insight:

Elmore hits this out of the park! He calmly and completely eviscerates the rigidity of school building design, the one size fits all practice of instruction and assessment in our schools, and anachronistic teacher preparation programs in our colleges.--Lou

My favorite passages:

"...Schools, as we currently know them, will continue to exist, if only because the byzantine collection of political interests that underlie them will keep them afloat regardless of their contribution to learning. The Postal Service continues to exist, as the function of moving information fluidly and efficiently in society has migrated out into other organizational forms.

To engage the next generation of young leaders in the important task of building society’s capacity to learn in the service of innovation and creativity, we will need to provide them with a broader array of opportunities to lead in settings where they can exercise meaningful judgment and control, without having to wait in line for a career path that may take decades to acknowledge their energy and creativity....

....The definition of learning for society at large as been given over to political professionals, who are educational amateurs of the worst kind. The broader society, thankfully, is smarter than the institutionalized schooling sector.

Learning, as an individual and social activity, has never been so alive as the present, and it will continue to grow in scope and breadth indefinitely. The experiences I had as a learner in the world, challenged by serious intellectuals and by involvement in life-altering, personally wrenching experiences, are now available to a much broader swath of society...."

A growing number of American students, shattered by the grueling marathon of high school and the coldblooded “college process,” are opting to take a year to regroup before tackling higher education — a practice long common in Britain and Australia. Attendance at “gap fairs” more than doubled in the United States between 2010 and 2013, and enrollment in gap-year programs grew 27 percent from 2012 to 2013 alone, according to Ethan Knight, executive director of the American Gap Association. Many college websites, including Harvard’s and Yale’s, now encourage prospective freshman to consider a gap year; Middlebury even provides links to specific programs.

No wonder: Research shows that students who take a gap year not only arrive at college refreshed and refocused, but also perform better academically. One study found that gap-year students at Middlebury and the University of North Carolina maintained grade point averages between .1 and .4 points higher than their gap-free peers. “That should reassure parents worried that their kids are never going to get back on track after a gap year,” says Bob Clagett, a former dean of admissions at Middlebury who conducted the study.

Lou Salza's insight:

My favorite Passage:

".....Taking a gap year turned out to be one of the smartest decisions my daughter has ever made. She had a spectacular experience in Salzburg, bonding with her host family, perfecting her German, traveling through Europe with assorted new friends, and otherwise developing the confidence and skills necessary to navigate unfamiliar terrain. In the wish-I-didn’t-know department: She couch-surfed, accepted autobahn rides from strangers and once had to decide whether to spend her last three euros on food or bus fare home.

By the time she started college this fall, she couldn’t have been better prepared — or more excited...."

Even the best-intended comments can make a child with dyslexia feel discouraged or inadequate. We talked to dyslexia advocate Ben Foss, author of The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan. He shared tips about what words can hurt—and what to say instead.

our analyses show that most parental behavior has no benefit on academic performance. While there are some forms of parental involvement that do appear to have a positive impact on children academically, we find at least as many instances in which more frequent involvement is related to lower academic performance.

As it turns out, the list of what generally works is short: expecting your child to go to college, discussing activities children engage in at school (despite the complications we mentioned above), and requesting a particular teacher for your child.

Lou Salza's insight:

My favorite passage:

"Conventional wisdom holds that since there is no harm in having an involved parent, why shouldn’t we suggest as many ways as possible for parents to participate in school? This conventional wisdom is flawed. Schools should move away from giving the blanket message to parents that they need to be more involved and begin to focus instead on helping parents find specific, creative ways to communicate the value of schooling, tailored to a child’s age. Future research should investigate how parental involvement can be made more effective, but until then, parents who have been less involved or who feel uncertain about how they should be involved should not be stigmatized.

The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the 150+ communities working with the Campaign are dedicated to narrowing the gap between children from low-income families and their more affluent peers. This video shows why that gap occurs and how we can close it. Please embed on your website and share on your social media platforms.

Lou Salza's insight:

I watched this video and was stunned to learn that NOWHERE in the statistics or the recommendations do they underscore the need for scientific reading approaches! Once again, we seem to be willing to blame what the film calls the "zipcode lottery" for success or failure to achieve reading milestones.

The fact is that we are failing lots of kids in all kinds of zip codes because we refuse to implement evidence based reading education approaches.

While the hunt to identify a 'neural signature' for dyslexia takes place in labs across the country by running children through fMRI machines; I suggest test policy makers and school administrators and professors of education to identify a neural signature for refusal to read, understand and apply relevant research in reading education when designing curriculum for our public school children. --Lou

Simply put, executive functions are self-regulating skills. We all use them every day to do things like plan ahead, stay organized, solve problems and focus on what’s important. These are some of the same things kids with ADHD have trouble doing. So is there a difference between executive functioning issues and ADHD? And if so, what is it?

ADHD is a disorder that’s defined by three broad sets of behaviors or symptoms: inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity. Kids with ADHD have trouble doing things like paying attention, following directions, sitting quietly and waiting for their turn.

Children are diagnosed with ADHD if they demonstrate these symptoms much more often than other children their age do, and so much so that and it’s causing them real difficulty at school and in their lives.

Executive functions, on the other hand, are very specific ways that the brain works. This means that things like inattention and impulsivity are divided into more distinct skills that kids typically develop during childhood and adolescence.

Personalized learning isn’t the latest fad in education. In fact, it’s an approach that great teachers have long used to ward off drudgery, to challenge students to do their best and to infuse their classrooms with energy and a sense of possibility. Thousands of years after Socrates engaged and challenged his student Plato with dialogues that inspired him to write The Republic, Charles Babbage encouraged Ada Lovelace to use her mathematical talents to create what is now considered the first computer program.

Lou Salza's insight:

Isn't it time to re-design the school environment

Excerpt:

"...What’s different today is the pace at which the momentum for personalized learning is building, thanks to a combination of cutting-edge technology, a growing body of research and a wider appreciation for the power of this approach to teaching and learning. Taken together, these catalysts have helped grow personalized learning from a sporadic practice to an insurgent philosophy.

The next challenge is to use what we already know: that tutoring and learning for mastery can make a dramatic difference for individual students, to help discover how to deliver that kind of rich, personalized learning experience to millions of students..."

Celebrities are working to help transform learning for kids in U.S. public schools. Vanessa Kirsch, founder and CEO of venture philanthropy fund "New Profit," explains the focus of the fund.

Lou Salza's insight:

I liked this spot very much. Vanessa Kirsch moves the conversation and the dialogue about education away from the 19th and 20th Century quagmires into a re-consideration of school design. It should not escape us that the inspiration for this conversation is centered in the experience of our students who come to school with dyslexia and ADHD.--Lou

"... the Lawrence School in Cleveland, Ohio, impressed me with its academic rigor and its mainstream social environment — a place where students who learn differently could prepare to flourish in a world where such differences are seldom accommodated."

Lou Salza's insight:

Proud to be mentioned in a blog acknowledging the challenges faced by so many students with learning differences in all kinds of schools. Many thanks to all those who work on their behalf at home and at school!--Lou

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Lou Salza's insight:

Take turns, play nice! , pay attention to team members, employ more women!--Why does this not surprise?--Lou

President Obama hopes to make two years of free community college accessible for up to nine million Americans. I’m guessing the new Congress will squawk at the $60 billion price tag, but I hope the idea sticks, because more veterans, from Iraq and Afghanistan this time, as well as another generation of mothers, single parents and workers who have been out of the job market, need lower obstacles between now and the next chapter of their lives. High school graduates without the finances for a higher education can postpone taking on big loans and maybe luck into the class that will redefine their life’s work. Many lives will be changed.

Chabot College is still in Hayward, though Mr. Coovelis, Ms. Fitzgerald and Mr. Kennedy are no longer there. I drove past the campus a few years ago with one of my kids and summed up my two years there this way: “That place made me what I am today.”

Lou Salza's insight:

Remarkable story made even more remarkable because Tom Hanks looks back to his community college days as the change that made a difference for him....--Lou

Excerpt:

"...IN 1974, I graduated from Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif., an underachieving student with lousy SAT scores. Allowed to send my results to three colleges, I chose M.I.T. and Villanova, knowing such fine schools would never accept a student like me but hoping they’d toss some car stickers my way for taking a shot. I couldn’t afford tuition for college anyway. I sent my final set of stats toChabot, a community college in nearby Hayward, Calif., which, because it accepted everyone and was free, would be my alma mater.

For thousands of commuting students, Chabot was our Columbia, Annapolis, even our Sorbonne, offering courses in physics, stenography, auto mechanics, certified public accounting, foreign languages, journalism — name the art or science, the subject or trade, and it was probably in the catalog. The college had a nursing program that churned out graduates, sports teams that funneled athletes to big-time programs, and parking for a few thousand cars — all free but for the effort and the cost of used textbooks.

Classmates included veterans back from Vietnam, women of every marital and maternal status returning to school, middle-aged men wanting to improve their employment prospects and paychecks..."

The right app can improve your child’s learning, help her manage specific challenges—and provide hours of fun! Here are 10 new or recently updated options as of December, 2014. For more ideas, check out Tech Finder.

Lou Salza's insight:

Peter Drucker once noted that leadership is all about strengths: "The task of leadership," he wrote,"is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system's weaknesses irrelevant".

I suggest this is our task in schools: teaching and learning in ways that make a childs challenges as unimportant as possible. THese tools do exactly that!--Lou

But here is the thing. Many schools in the UK are now rigorously teaching children to read by phonically decoding unknown words, here generally referred to as SSP, Systematic Synthetic Phonics', elsewhere sometimes called the Alphabetic Principle. These schools are achieving results where almost all children can decode effectively by age 6, as demonstrated by the statutory phonics screening check. The children then go on to read confidently and fluently by the time they are 7. That is to say, there are no children at all emerging as dyslexic from some of these classes. From many of the others only somewhere between 1% and 3% of children look like they might have some ongoing difficulty with reading, nowhere close to the 10%+ incidence of dyslexia found more generally. Sadly these schools remain a minority; most UK schools are instead committed to teaching a mixed approach to reading, encouraging the guessing of unknown words, purportedly so that children learn to make sense of a text. (I have explained elsewhere on this blog why this is so counter-productive.) However there are more than enough committed SSP schools to demonstrate clearly that their outcomes are no fluke and that they can be achieved in areas of social deprivation just as well as those in more affluent locations.

Lou Salza's insight:

Fascinating British blogger's account of the very same situation we suffer from here in the USA: What Barbara Bateman called 'dysteachia' many years ago! The fault is not in the children, their homes or their stars--the fault is in the curriculum! Simply substitute "illiterate" and "illiteracy" for "dyslexic" and Dyslexia" when you read School Inspector Askew's Blog. --Lou

My favorite passage:

".....But why do the schools so persistently look to the child rather than to their own teaching when that child fails to make expected progress in reading? The most obvious explanation is that it deflects blame from themselves, and we have to admit that this desire is all too common a trait in many of us. Yet, as I have said often on this blog, teachers are overwhelmingly decent and concerned people. There must be more to it than this. I am convinced that the answer lies in the deep-seated culture of so called 'progressivism' that pervades our school system (although it is in fact not progressive at all, but has for a good while now been the orthodoxy). In terms of the teaching of reading this involves the belief - and I use the word deliberately - that children will become 'real readers' only if they learn to read by mixed, multi-cueing methods, and by guessing at words to try to reach meaning. This way of thinking has become so embedded that it has taken on many of the features of a religion. It has its fanatics, who continually repeat its mantras, whatever alternative arguments or evidence are presented. Even for the majority this 'credo' has become mutually reinforcing and perpetuating. Teachers are very threatened, deeply offended even, when it is gainsaid. It follows, of course, that when a child fails to learn to read by the methods currently being used, it must necessarily be the child's fault. To admit the teaching is wrong would be to admit that their own deeply held beliefs are wrong, and that is one of the most difficult things in life to do.

Despite years of trying to challenge these beliefs with reason and evidence, I feel, sadly, that I, and others of like mind, have not got very far, or at least not nearly far enough. It is enormously frustrating and my heart bleeds for the children of our countries when I see how many 'dyslexics' we have when we need have hardly any..."

When I was in sixth grade, master girl-grower Ann Klotz made a brave voyage from New York City to Shaker Heights, Ohio so she could run our school. I met her simultaneously as my new classmate Miranda’s mom and as my school’s new Headmistress. Ms. Klotz is a spark who has lit Laurel ablaze with energy and ingenuity. We were “her girls” and she set out to inspire us, to know us deeply, to love us. She taught us we were there to “Dream, Dare, Do.”

She invited us into her office, into her home, into her heart. She made not only our educations but our lives her priority (and showed us that the two are far less separate than we think). She saw not just the people we could be but the ones we already were, and so she asked that we be and do and say our best all the time, everywhere – to each other; about each other; in class; at home; on the internet; after graduation.

At Laurel, with our teachers as our anchors, Ms. Klotz as a leader, and the school’s mission as our springboard, we were asked – no, challenged – to engage with more vigor, to listen with more intent, to leap with more bravery, to speak with more conviction, to fail gloriously.

Our teachers, charged “to inspire each girl to fulfill her promise and better the world,” were entrenched in the business of growing us. They were grower-extraordinaires, with us at each turn, knee-deep in the dirt, not just planting the seeds of our growth but actively cultivating it — questioning, challenging, pushing, demanding, nurturing, encouraging, asking.

Lou Salza's insight:

Emma Miller got this right! Insightful commentary from one who knows!

Dell and I are proud grandparents of a Laurel 1st grader! Thank you to the Faculty and Staff--and to Ann Klotz, "master girl grower" and mentor to school leaders far and near. --Lou

Football has a concussion problem, from the National Football League down to Pee-Wee teams. And there are lots of efforts out there to fix it.

But Erik Swartz, a University of New Hampshire professor of kinesiology, studies movement and says there has been very little discussion about getting to the root of the problem: technique. Instead of clashing helmet-first, as football players often do, the better approach is to keep the head up and tackle chest to chest, never leading with your helmet — or your face, neck or shoulders.

Swartz says his idea to experiment with having players drill without helmets came from his own time playing rugby.

Lou Salza's insight:

I was alerted to this article while reading on the NAIS.org web site where Debra Wilson has initiated a discussion around wellness.--Lou

According to the Center for American Progress, women still only make up 14.6 percent of executive officers, 8.1 percent of top earners and a mere 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. In Massachusetts, The Boston Club released a report showing that nearly 14 percent of the 100 largest public companies have women as directors, which is below the national average of 17 percent.

Despite these discouraging statistics, there is reason for optimism. Earlier this year an article in Forbes, “11 Reasons 2014 Will Be a Breakout Year for Women Entrepreneurs,” set forth evidence that explains why the numbers of women-owned firms have increased significantly in the last couple of years. According to research, women are able to build better, more effective teams. Women cooperate and communicate effectively, which are both important qualities of a strong entrepreneur. And women are more proactively seeking visibility these days because they recognize the importance of public speaking, and are beginning to network more aggressively.

While this information is encouraging, it is meaningless unless we ensure that these small gains turn into larger wins. So how do we take what we know and make it mean something? The answer begins with middle and secondary education for girls.

Lou Salza's insight:

My favorite passage:

".... To create female leaders, we need to raise them as leaders. We need to integrate courses into our curricula that go beyond basic English, math and science classes, such as ones geared towards the principles of engineering, or classes that explore the central role of science and technology in shaping human life, civilization and thought. We need to incorporate into our program business-oriented courses that teach our students at a young age how to succeed in the work force. Otherwise women are disadvantaged when they leave school and enter the employment market. We need to continue to foster all-girls programs that provide an atmosphere where girls excel as leaders without a male presence, because research shows that girls are more engaged, and exude more confidence and competitiveness in single-sex environments..."

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